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Artificial Soul

"If you can recreate each and every neuron and its interconnections, you can (re)create an artificial brain

which is exactly like ours - conscious, thinking, self evaluating, intelligent and capable of dreaming and

feeling; put appropriately - an artificial life with an artificial soul!"

Some may deem the statement as outrageous and absurd but as I see it, this a perfectly logical and

sound statement. It is as clear as any mathematical axiom. Whether or not this can be done is an

entirely different question and if it is ever attempted in this form, it sure will be the worst way of

achieving our goals in artificial intelligence (AI). Whether or not you accept this statement boils down to

which view you hold towards everything - Physicalist or Dualist. In dualism it is claimed that mental

phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. Putting it bluntly all that the dualist are saying is that

there exists things in nature that can never be understood and explained (hence the term non physical).

This to me is an outrageous statement completely

absurd. All I can say to the people holding these views

is - wait and watch, the future is going to rock your

world!!! Contrary to these beliefs, the other set of

people accept the philosophies of physicalism.

According to physicalism, the language of physics is the

universal language of science and, consequently, any

knowledge can be brought back to the statements on

the physical objects. (As a dualist would) Put bluntly it

says that everything is material. Now do not take the

high school text book meaning of material. Material

here is anything whose sum of mass and energy is

greater than zero - so light is material as it has finite

energy (but no mass). Other way of saying this is that in

physicalism everything can be explained at least in theory. This is not only a belief, it is the single most

strongest source of motivation for a researcher and a scientist.

The progress in science and technology over the last few centuries is momentous yet when it comes to

AI the smartest machine we have has the intelligence of a retarded cockroach. The field of AI is

comparatively very new and research in the field was sparked by Alan Turing in a seminal 1950 paper -

Computing Machinery and Intelligence which is considered to be the backbone of philosophy of AI. In

the paper he proposed a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. The Turing test explained in

simple words is a test where the task of the machine is to imitate human. So if you are chatting to a bot

(you will get numerous ones on Skype) and cannot figure out if it's a human or a machine then the bot is

said to have qualified the Turing test. There are many variants of the test and its interpretations but all

of them operate on the same basic principle. Sadly not even a single machine has qualified the Turing

test. Although providing a solid foundation for defining intelligence the Turing test does not say

anything about consciousness and self realization. What is it that demarcates consciousness from

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intelligence? And when a machine running on solid mathematical foundations suddenly venture into the

world of high level thinking is still an open question. The branch of AI itself is broken into hundreds of

subfields like machine learning, neural networks, fuzzy logic, Bayesian framework, search and

optimization, symbolic logic so on and so forth... Each subfield is a mammoth with years of high end

research put into them. It is not so surprising that there is not much co-ordination between these sub

fields which could be stopping us from gather a larger view of intelligence and conscious machines. Also

it might have happened that our approaches to this are wrong till now - may be we need to take a

radically different approach. There are many brave people who are trying out the radical like Kwabena

Boahen who is trying to reverse engineer the brain at the neuro biological level (he took the first

statement quite seriously!), Jeff Hawkins who is trying out a new framework (actually the only

framework) on which to build intelligent machines, Henry Markram who works on the Blue brain project

where he simulates parts of brain on a supercomputer. I am quite skeptical about their approaches.

As of now when brain is compared with computers, it turns out that the brain is actually quite slow in

terms of how fast information flows in it, slow by many orders compared to a computer. But brains are

massively parallel and vastly distributed which makes them unimaginably efficient, robust and fast interms of processing data. It is hard to imagine what will happen if a brain can be designed on silicon

which will work thousand times faster than our brain and have the same intelligence! Which brings

along all the moral issues. If computers have life what rights will they have? Would not they outrun us

once they are more intelligent than us? What is life, pain, happiness and love - everything surely is just

bunch of electo-chemical reactions, but then where to draw the line? May be one day a computer will

tell me the answers. I am waiting for that day.

Amiya Patanaik (Graduate Student)

Centre for Computational Intelligence

Nanyang Technological University